Here Are Your NXT TakeOver: Toronto Predictions & Analysis

NXT TakeOver: Toronto airs live this Saturday at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT, exclusively on WWE Network. The show features a big rematch for the NXT Championship, a returning challenger for the NXT Women’s Championship and the finals of the Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic.

As per usual, here’s our rundown of the show and who we think will win each match. TakeOver days are among the best wrestling days of whatever month they’re in, so get (and/or stay) hype and drop down into our comments section to let us know what you think will happen.

There’s a sense in which SAnitY can wait for now, they have DIY/TM61 picking ahead. What about Roderick Strong, though? Just arrived in the company and has nothing because two other people got injured.

Joe is both ready and needed on the main roster on both shows. Nak still has things to work on before they’ll give him a call up. I want Joe to win, but I also want to see Joe show up at Survivor Series.

Dillinger – Roode can afford a loss and still be super over
DIY – Revival gets called up shortly after
AOP – I actually think this is all depends on who ends up winning the 2/3 falls match, but since I picked DIY, the AOP get the nod here
Asuka – because, well, she’s Asuka…I agree with everyone, Ember Moon is going to be her only formidable challenger and eventual overtaker (is overtaker a word? whatever, you get what I’m saying)
Nak – Joe gets the call up shortly after

Generally, this is going to be another in a long line of great NXT live events and will subsequently overshadow the main roster PPV it’s paired with.

This is a fun card. Good mix of newcomers, returning legends and Faces of NXT.
– Win, Tye Win! Roode can definitely play with suffering a loss and having his confidence shook. But Tye needs something to legitimize him right now.
-TM-61 are getting better, but this needs to be AoP. I assumed they were going to be another Ascension: Great in squashes, not so great at competitive matches. But their last two showings really turned me around. No reason they should lose. Especially to set them up against..
-DIY. Built in storyline having a tainted win over them. Revival has done all they can do and have done it expertly. Smackdown’s non-Uso heel teams are in rough shape, they could definitely use a Revival.
-Asuka isn’t losing her first match to an outsider. Hope this leads to a longer look for Mickie.
-It feels like Joe and Nak could go to the main roster anytime. As stated above, Joe needs to find Roman and beat him up like he owes him money. Nak’s charisma and mannerisms kind of surpass any language barrier and his current selling mood (not interested!) would make a better fit with Roman/Cena on the main roster. (A Roman/Nakamura match I imagine would be just hitting knees and superman punches on each other and popping back up.). But I think Joe loses, is on the main roster by RR and Shinsuke gets upset for the title before WM by Roode and is a post-WM callup.

Criticizing the card is fine, but you gotta give an alternate card. Unless you’re saying they just shouldn’t have Takeover. I mean who do you want Shinsuke to wrestle if not the previous champ Joe? Who even deserves a shot? Ares? Roode? Dillenger? Jose? Nevermind the fact that Joe has the obligatory rematch. Who else has done enough to be there? Unless Regal is going to double down on booking an outsider in the title match. So Shinsuke/Joe needs to happen, and couldn’t have been built much better. Appreciate the product (or not) for what it is, not for your meta perceptions about what’s probably definitely maybe going to happen in the bigger WWE picture. The same reasoning had Balor losing at Dallas before WM, and he won anyway. Maybe they’re fasttracking Nak for the main roster. Who knows? I say just live in the moment.

Who do you want to be challenging for the tag titles? AOP is too soon. Sanity is 9 seconds old. You just don’t have many face teams in NXT right now. TM-61 has floundered. DIY is the most credible threat. “probably won’t top Alpha/Revival”? Is that supposed to be an insult? It’s unrealistic to expect everything to always top everything that came before it. There’s a LOT of middle ground between being a great match and being the best ever of all ever.

This idea of the DRC finals having no “juice”, I’m not sure what that means. I mean, every match can’t be steeped in months and years of history. Every once in awhile, you have to actually go out there and do something for the first time. That’s what “juice” is made of. Sometimes they need to just let matches exist and speak for themselves. The story is it’s about honoring Dusty with a good match. That’s all it needs.

As for 5 matches, it’s just a 2 hour show. Including about 30 min of entrances and video packages and extra-curriculars. 90 minutes divided 5 ways is 18-min matches. sounds pretty solid to me.

Again, the point of all of this is not that you’re wrong to criticize the card, but, what would you rather they do? And if this is the best card for the current roster, what would you rather see systematically different that would give them better options?

The reality we have to face is that the brand split gutted NXT. And that’s not a bad thing. NXT exists to be gutted over and over and over and keep rebuilding.

NXT was in Boston last night, and I totally slept on it. After seeing half of my Facebook feed as being pictures from the event, I regret it. Apparently, Cedric Alexander and Roderick Strong had a match that blew the doors off the place.

Yeah me too, I’ve only been half paying attention to NXT recently and had no idea they were in town until last week. If I had realized it sooner I probably would have gone, but I went to the show in Lowell back in April so I feel okay about skipping this one.

What gives me pause about Roode-Tye is what (spoiler) Nakamura does next. Aries is tied in with Itami for now but Strong’s doing nothing and Almas is on the charge so do they need Roode keeping strong for any good reason? They don’t really have a secondary face right now, and Dillinger actually got over organically over time and commitment in a world of short-term pop signings.

If AoP don’t win, put them on Raw to beat up New Day and push them as the only possible thing stopping them breaking Demolition’s record. I don’t think it’ll be entirely clean, because TM61/SAnitY seems a logical path afterwards, but score one for Mr Dot Com and friends. Imagine if someone had told you a year ago that this Takeover would feature a personnel-based Last Battle of Atlanta reference at the behest of TMDK.

Dawson’s real but played as kayfabe knee injury gives Revival an excuse to lose while looking strong and now they’re committed to the cause with the split hints receding a DIY title run, with a team they nearly beat next, looks logical and then we can have Revival do what I just said AoP should do instead. Watch the back of your knees, Xavier.

Saw somewhere that Mickie’s taking bookings into next year so I don’t know if this is a tryout as such, maybe an exhibition we can write off when someone else gets going. Maybe an Asuka full heel turn? The next Takeover is set for Rumble weekend in Ember’s home state…

First thing Nak and Joe need to do is have a much better match than last time. Even for a man famous for coasting it most of the time Shinsuke feels like name value rather than star rating gold right now and Joe could do with becoming a destroyer once again. Nakamura wins, Joe works the Australian tour next month and then goes up on the last TV week of the year.

I’d like Dillinger to beat Roo. If Roo loses, he’s still Bobby Roo and I think it could propel Tye to huge things. Tye’s bounced back from the Almas match–but that whole situation shows that NXT isn’t above godawful booking so I don’t know. I give it to Dillinger.

TM61 v AoP is the hardest match for me to call. I don’t think AoP gain anything from the win but TM61 are boring as hell. I give it to TM61 but not clean.

Giarciampa put on a halfway decent match against two blow-up dolls and win.

James has no chance of beating Asuka with the title on the line. The cool thing about Breeze v Liger was that it was a 95% surety that they weren’t going to job Breeze out but then they did and they could because there wasn’t a title on the line. Mickie’s not taking the belt, I just hope they put on a great match.

I think the time to beat Nakamura was at the last Takeover. That said, I’m not sure where they go from here. NXT has a thriving mid-card with no belt and a pretty sparse top-end at the moment. Regardless of who wins, who challenges next? Eric Young and Bobby Roo are the only real possibilities I see with everyone else injured. I think Nakamura takes it but no idea who the next challenger is.

-I desperately want to pick Tye, but with DIY likely winning the tag belts, I doubt we’ll have two “underdog finally succeeding” stories tonight. Roode takes it.
-AoP (with hopefully a star-making performance for TMDK)
-DIY
-Asuka
-Nakamura wins. Joe finishes up the next round of NXT tapings, which takes him to a Royal Rumble debut.

– Roode is going to cheat and win so we can all really have a reason to boo him, which has been hard to do given his entrance theme. Tye will be fine and I believe he will have a break-out performance.
– AoP vsw TM61 will be a no-contest. A for real shark will interfere and attack everyone in the match. Paul Ellering will be thankful this Thursday for shark cages.
– 2/3 falls match..I’m gonna go with Team Do It Themselves as the only title change of the night.
– Mickie gets pushed into an oncoming Asuka and gets killed off again.
– Shinsuke retains. I’m curious as to who he’d feud with next. Cien Almas maybe? Roode? Roddy? Young? Jose? No way..but the others would be fun match-ups.

I admittedly have watched barely any of Nakamura’s work in Japan but am I the only one who thinks he’s kinda wack? I enjoyed his debut with Sami but Sami could put on a good match with a beanbag. Yeah he’s got the ‘charisma’ or whatever word you choose to describe him making weird faces and gestures but he’s got like…two actual moves? Three if you count where he puts his foot on the guys head and rocks out? Half the time the kinshasa looks awful, he doesn’t sell for shit, and for obvious reasons he’s not great on the mic. Clearly they’re building the new NXT around him so I guess I’m missing something…

I can see Dillinger winning because they need to start building up a new major face that can take over Nakamura’s spot so that he can move up to the main roster. As far as Mickie James goes, this is just a one-shot thing. I do not know if the WWE has offered her anything more. She did mention that she would want to do a program with Charlotte. I would like to see TM61 win but am not sure. I can see the Authors of Pain winning and then challenge Tomasso and Ciampa or the Revival for the belts. I think that The Revival will drop the straps and move up to the main roster. Nakamura and Joe will be a brutal repeat of their previous match on NXT Takeover Brooklyn but I cannot see Joe winning the belt. I can see Joe showing up on Sunday night at Survivor Series taking Shane McMahon’s place on SD team.

– When it comes to Tye and Roode, I would say that having Tye win would serve better down the line when Roode dethrones Shinsuke. Having Roode and Tye feud over the NXT Title would write itself, building Tye as a great babyface and Roode as a dastardly bastard, reminiscent of Mankind v HHH.

– One of the matches tapped at NXT Brooklyn was AOP vs TM61 I saw it live and it was surprisingly good, I wouldn’t sleep on this one.

– 2 out of 3 falls is going to be MAGIC, plain and simple.

– Expect some “You still got it” chants for Mickie James, but also expect them to feel a bit forced.

– Nakamura Vs Joe is going to be Strong Style all the way. I personally was expecting more from Brooklyn, but i think it’s because they weren’t trying to give us everything out of the gate. If the Joe that fought Kobashi shows up and Shinsuke turns on his 5 Star match mode it will be amazing. Bonus* points if Joe loses and shows up to replace Shane on Sunday.